Fashion and creativity

Isaac Mizrahi was born in New York and attended Parsons School of Design. His CV is testimony to his adaptability. He is the creative director for Excel Brands, appears on TV shows and films, has his own TV series, is a writer, performer and designs costumes for several Broadway productions.

From fashion design, to music, to film, his creative works seamlessly inhabit several creative spaces. Mizrahi eschews the label of ‘fashion designer’, refusing to be boxed in:

I don’t really think of myself as a designer, I don’t really think of myself necessarily as a fashion designer. And frankly, I don’t really know what to call myself. I think of myself as a … I don’t know what I think of myself as.”

Always urging for the ‘new’, his process emphasises the tensions between boredom and diversity:

I feel as little comfort as possible is a good thing, you know. And at least, you know, in my case, because if I just do one thing all the time, I don’t know, I get very, very bored. I bore very easily. And you know, I don’t say that I do everything well, I just say that I do a lot of things, that’s all.”

Mizrahi says he doesn’t know where inspiration comes from, but the answer may lay in his dizzying his curiosity:

And often, I’m driving in a taxi and I see a hole in a shirt, or something that looks very interesting or pretty or functional in some way that I’d never seen happen before. And so I’d make the car stop, and I’d get out of the car and walk, and see that in fact there wasn’t a hole, but it was a trick of my eye, it was a shadow, you know.

Or if there was a hole I’d think like, oh damn, there was actually someone thought of that thought already. Someone made that mistake already so I can’t do it anymore.”

A self-confessed insomniac, Mizrahi is preoccupied with looking at the details and meanings of everything around him,

I sit up at night and I watch movies and I watch women in movies a lot. And I think about, you know, their roles, and about how you have to, like, watch what your daughters look at. Because I look at the way women are portrayed all the time.

Whether they’re kind of glorified in this way, or whether they’re kind of, you know, ironically glorified, or whether they’re, you know, sort of denigrated, or ironically denigrated.”

Mizrahi’s message? Be an scavenger of culture. Adapt everything you watch, see and hear into what you make.